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Babi Yar

I first heard of Babi Yar when watching the mini-series War and Remembrance back in the 1980’s. As a teenager, it was a particularly difficult portion for me to watch because of the violence it portrayed, but producer Dan Curtis was determined to remain as true as possible to the events that transpired while still maintaining the decency required to show it on television.

The year was 1941, and Germany was steamrolling over the Soviet Union on its way to Moscow. Hundreds of miles to the South, progress was a little slower, so Adolf Hitler diverted forces from the North to help even out the front lines. With the added boost in personnel and armor, the Wehrmacht was rolling again, surrounding a large Russian contingent in the city of Kiev. After desperate fighting, the city fell on September 19th.

Shortly after the takeover, several buildings occupied by the Germans were blown up. Though later it would be shown that the NKVD (Russian security) forces were responsible, for the Germans (as we have seen before) it was an opportunity for revenge, this time on a grand scale. All Jews in Kiev were informed that they would need to assemble near the city cemetary for deportation. Any refusing to do so would be shot.

And so, on September 29, 1941, they gathered…by the thousands. And the Germans deported them in groups…to Babi Yar, a large ravine in the northern suburbs of Kiev. There they were stripped of their possessions, stripped of the theirs clothes, lined up on the edge of the ravine, and machine-gunned. This obscene act would be repeated hundreds of times and, during the two days, nearly 34,000 Jewish men, women, and children would be slaughtered.

When it was finished, the Germans gathered up the valuables, gathered up the clothes, covered the bodies with dirt, and left. Over the next 18 months, an estimated 70,000+ additional people would meet their end here. And then in 1943, when the war began to turn against Germany, all the corpses would be dug up and burned by the Germans in an effort to hide their deeds.

As we have said before, the war between Germany and Russia was a no-holds-barred, nothing-is-sacred conflict. And for the Jewish people, caught between German hatred and Russian indifference, the events at Babi Yar were just the beginning of the nightmare.